Category: pop culture

Thursday’s Theme Music

As I endured the cold and its migrations, interactions, and pain during the last few days and nights, I began assigning musical instruments and notes to my experience, thinking, how would my cold sound musically? Just something to while away the sleepless, mucus filled hours.

Doing so reminded me of “Love Reign O’er Me,” by the Who. The song begins with a thunderstorm and rain. The song is the final cut of the Who rock-opera, Quadraphenia, and marks the final act and possibly redemption of the main character after chaotic struggles with love, drugs, family, violence, and identity.

Mom bought the album for me for Christmas 1973, based on my older sister’s recommendation. Thanks, Mom and sis!

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Wednesday’s Theme Music

Ah, from 10CC, in honor of my illness, “You Got A Cold,” from 1977.

Your nose is runnin’
And your eyes are red
Your head is achin’
You’d be better in bed
From the bottom of your fever
To the throbbing in your toes
You’ve got a cold

h/t AZlyrics.com

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

I’d only recently learned that Dave Mason wrote this song. I knew that Traffic had performed it, but in my heart, this song always belonged to Joe Cocker. Whichever group or performer does it, the song always lifts me up. I loved it when he sang it in concert.

Hope it lifts you today, wherever you are, whatever you’re doing. Here’s Joe Cocker with “Feeling Alright” from 1969.

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

Staying with Argent, I enjoy one of the early songs he wrote for The Zombies, “She’s Not There.” Although it’s been covered by many others, including Santana, I like the original.

It came out in 1964, when I was eight years old. I obviously learned it through repetitive play, mostly on the radio. Its melody seems reflective about the subject, while the words are bitter and wondering. I like the yin and yang feel to the combination.

 

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Sunday’s Theme Music

Streaming from my childhood once again. I enjoy this song for its organ solo. Because of that, I prefer the long version. Thinking about the words, there aren’t many verses in the song. Most of us know the title lines: “Hold your head up.”

Here’s Argent, with Rod Argent (formerly of The Zombies, which must count for something) on keyboards.

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Saturday’s Theme Music

I’ve always enjoyed this song’s beginning. A chorus, a softly strumming acoustic guitar, and then a gentle French horn, each remarkable by themselves but coming together to set you up in an introspective mood.

When I first heard it, I thought, “Is that a French horn? Who is playing it?” Because a French horn isn’t part of the Rolling Stones’ typical composition. Later, there’s organ and piano, and wondered, “Who is on those?” I learned it was Al Kooper on them, along with the French horn. Pretty cool.

The song is, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a well-known Rolling Stones song from that terrific album, Let It Bleed. I like the song’s story-telling style, how it touches on different political and social elements of that period, rising rises from a reflection on a female addict into a rousing anthem for rebellion and struggle.

You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You just might find
You get what you need

h/t AZLyrics.com

It’s a stirring rallying cry: try, and you might find that you get what you need, and it may not be what you thought it was.

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Friday’s Theme Music

Although this song is about a man’s relationship with a woman, I often thought of it in conjunction with my employers. “I have become cumbersome to this job.” Hah. Or, they’d become cumbersome to me. As the song says, walls were being built. And sometimes, I thought, despite the balance, this job experience has become cumbersome.

Here’s Seven Mary Three with “Cumbersome,” 1994.

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Thursday’s Theme Music

America on Coffee posted a piece about Sister Sledge and “We Are Family.”  Their post triggered a memory landslide.

The song came out in 1979. The Pittsburgh Pirates adopted it as their theme song. Led by Willie Stargell, they chased down a World Series championship.

Personally, I ended one life chapter and resumed another. I’d left the military to buy a restaurant and attend college in October, 1978. It didn’t work out well, so I headed back to the military. Preparing to leave for my assignment at Randolph-Brooks AFB in Texas, my car, a signal orange Porsche 914, burned up in the driveway. Terrific. I flew out alone to live in the barracks and save some money. My wife would fly out to join me in a few weeks.

I’d arrived at R-B AFB and was in transient quarters when Pittsburgh took on Baltimore in game seven of the World Series. It was a beautiful fall day in Texas. I listened on the room’s AM/FM clock radio as Pittsburgh won the game and the championship. The following Monday, I resumed my military career and kept going until I retired in 1995.

 

 

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Tuesday’s Theme Music

So much is written about money, right? About needing it, hating it, not having it, and wanting it. It’s the root of all evil, yet churches are on net, television, and radio, begging for it. It’s not the money, though, right? As Marie (Bernadette Peters) said in The Jerk, “I don’t care about losing the money. It’s losing all the stuff.”

Today’s song is one of my all-time favorites. Why? I like the clashing drums, screaming guitars, and scathing lyrics. “Money. Get back. Keep your hands off my stack.”

Here’s Pink Floyd with “Money” from waaayyy back when I was young.

 

 

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Monday’s Theme Music

I like songs about change. This particular song, “Change,” by Blind Melon, has lyrics that cling to my dreamer’s mind.

So I want to write my words on the face of today.

And then they’ll paint it

And oh as I fade away,

They’ll all look at me and they’ll say,

Hey look at him and where he is these days.

When life is hard, you have to change.

I heard the song the year it was released. I thought the lyrics haunts the shadows of our existence. We strive to live, and some attempt to make a difference, but we’re such small drops of beings in such a huge ocean of beings. The song’s lyrics seemed sharp as volcanic rocks when Shannon Hoon, the group’s singer, died three years later. He’d been fighting addictions and substance abuse. He had to change, but couldn’t. Happens to a lot of us.
In the era of the Internet of Things, change is a speeding variable to modern life. See an actor and wonder, like the lyrics, where is he/she these days? To the Google machine to see. No, they’re not dead; they just faded away.
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